Land Use Database

The old A-1 Tow Yard near Barstow was the location of the Tired Iron Museum, a display of homemade terminator vehicles built by Ed and Greg Parker. The Parker family owned and operated an auto repair and towing shop here, and created these functional desert art cars mostly out of breakdowns and...

Alcatraz Island, the notorious prison that once housed 260 federal offenders per year on average, is now visited by over one million people a year. Tourists are permitted to see the main prison areas, however, much of the rambling old facility is off-limits.

Usually called "the world's largest maze" when it is created every year at this site, the maze, cut into a cornfield, is one of several major "maize mazes" that "crop up" across the country at the end of each summer. The company that operates and promotes this attraction builds mazes in New York...

A configuration of rocks in the forest that are aligned to various celestial bodies and solstices. Also a "sacrificial table" slab, and an "oracle chamber", all mysteriously erected by unknown agents. A prehistoric, megalithic tourist attraction.

Now a national historic site, this mill operated from 1913 to 1943, processing ore brought via the 22,000 foot Argo Tunnel. At the time it was built, it was the largest mill of its type in the world. It is now a tourist attraction.

The Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for most of the dredging and filling projects around the Bay, maintains the Bay Model in one of the original Marinship warehouses. The model is a 1.5 acre functional scale model of the entire San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta system, built...

The electric shovel that operated at this coal mine was the largest single-bucket excavating machine ever built, and one of the largest mobile earth-moving machines in the world. It used as much electricity as 27,500 homes to scoop out 325 tons of material in each bite (220 cubic yards)....

A remote gold-mining ghost town, north of Mono Lake, designated a State Historic Park in 1962. In its heyday, in 1879, it had a population of 10,000 and many of the original buildings remain, preserved in a state of "arrested decay". A sprawling ruin, in a remarkable landscape, that is only...

This resort city in the Ozarks calls itself "The Live Music Show Capital of the World." This city contains over 30 live performance theaters playing an average of 60 stage shows at any given time. While Branson is traditionally known for its country western music performances it currently features...

This American landmark, composed of ten vintage Cadillacs buried nose-first in a field outside Amarillo, was originally installed in 1974. It was conceived by a group of artists and architects known as Ant Farm (Chip Ward, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michaels), and it was funded and "seen through" by...

A ghost town theme park, built out of the fairly extensive remains of an actual old silver mining town dating back to 1881. Walter Knott, founder of the Knott's Berry Farm theme park, restored the ghost town, after taking much of it to Orange County, where he used it to begin his theme park there (...

"The world's only captive geyser" in downtown Soda Springs spews jets of water 100 feet in the air every hour, or every half hour during the tourist season. Similar to the famed Old Faithful and other geysers, the Soda Springs geyser erupts due to pressure created by the combination of carbon...

A collection of twenty-five or so living trees which have been grafted, trained, and formed into unusual shapes, including grids, loops, arches, and zig-zags. The work of a farmer named Alex Erlandson, who shaped over 70 trees from 1940 to 1963, resurrecting the medieval art of tree braiding,...

A building covered in corn: each year, the building's exterior is stripped off and a new one is applied, using thousands of bushels of corn, grain, and grasses. A tourist attraction and agricultural showpiece, the Corn Palace is used to host community events, shows, and sports events.

Opened in Spring 1997, the new headquarters of DeLorme Mapping Company features Eartha, the world's largest rotating globe. Eartha is over 41 feet in diameter and housed in a three-story glass atrium. It represents the Earth as it is seen from space. Every continent is detailed, with colors...

Hundreds of tall date palm trees form unusual patterns, at the remote interstate town of Desert Center. The project was begun in the early 1990's by the then owner of the town, Stanley Ragsdale (son of Stephen A.Ragsdale, the founder of the town), who trucked the trees from a date farm near Indio,...

A 35 acre sandy "desert," within the pine forests of Maine, which has been exploited as a tourist attraction. The sandy patch appeared as a result of the topsoil being eroded away from land clearing, overgrazing, and other bad farming practices that took place there around the turn of the century....

A dinosaur park consisting of 11 large fiberglass dinosaurs constructed by a single individual, Donald Bean, a retired carpenter. Opened in 1981, the park was originally located behind his house in the small community of Moscow. After his death, the dinosaurs were moved to their new home in...

The famous park that has been a vital part of Orange County's identity and economy opened in 1955. The Matterhorn, one of the park's more notable landmarks, was built in 1959, and, in order to fit the exemption for an otherwise prohibitive height restriction ordnance, had to be built as a sports...

A complex of about ten small mines that have been turned into rustic residences. Owned, and in most cases excavated, by Dugout Dick Zimmerman, who has been working the mines since 1948, and who died in 2010, at the age of 94. He became a bit of a celebrity, after being featured in national news...

A classic of the genre, this roadside attraction and family theme park is now abandoned and crumbling, after being closed in 1989. Located on the Baltimore Pike, a highway which has been surpassed by Interstate 70, the land immediately adjacent is now a shopping plaza, which has taken the name of...

Inside the pyramid in the town of Felicity is a time capsule and a plaque indicating the exact center of the world. Though it could be said that the surface of a spherical planet could have an infinite number of "centers" this is the only Center of the World officially recognized as such by the...

Forbidden Gardens was a massive recreation of a number of Imperial Chinese historic sites, built in 1997 on the plains of Texas by Ira P. H. Poon, a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. Included in this sprawling attraction were 6,000 terra-cotta soldiers at 1/3 scale, arrayed as they were found in China...

What is said to be the tallest fountain in the world is, suitably, in one of the most arid cities: Phoenix, Arizona. The fountain shoots eight tons of water as much as 625 feet in the air (70 feet higher than the Washington Monument), at the rate of 7,000 gallons per minute. Though it does not...

The Geographical Center of North America, in the town of Rugby, North Dakota, is marked with a pyramidal monument that measures 21 feet high, 6 feet wide at its base, and is placed on a heart-shaped foundation. Originally located across the highway, northwest of its present location, the monument...

The Geographic Center of the Lower 48 States is located north of Lebanon, Kansas. It was determined by finding the center of gravity for the contiguous United States, that is, the point at which a plane map of the 48 states would balance if it were of uniform thickness. A monument was erected in an...

The point at which the eastbound and westbound tracks for the first transcontinental railroad met. A visitors center has been built here by the National Park Service, at this remote site, at the northeastern edge of the Great Salt Lake. Initially, the Union Pacific, building the westbound track...